


This Is Halloween

by imkerfuffled



Series: Lucia Castillo, Helper of Superheroes [3]
Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Halloween, Halloween Costumes, rated for brief language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-30
Updated: 2015-10-30
Packaged: 2018-04-28 23:05:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5108888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imkerfuffled/pseuds/imkerfuffled
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Little Lucia and her friend Julie set out to make a Halloween costume. Complications arise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Is Halloween

**Author's Note:**

> Again, many thanks to stefaniegk, who continues to be a wonderful human being. Also apologies, since I promised a convention story, and then this came out instead... But, I do have plans for writing that soonish. This one should have been finished weeks ago, but then I discovered a fifty dollar Amazon gift card with my name on it and went a little crazy buying Kindle books. I _may_ have read four entire 300+ page novels since this Saturday alone, so my head has been off in lala land. 
> 
> And of course, HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

**14 Days to Halloween**

 

When Adrian came back from Saturday baseball practice, he found a tornado had torn straight through his living room. An explosion of papers littered every available surface, covered in what appeared to be printed out pictures and diagrams of Avengers uniforms. Shopping bags spilled their contents across the floor in a jumble of clothing and craft materials. A sewing machine, raided from the attic, sat on the couch surrounded by piles of sewing supplies and guidelines. No fewer than two laptops lay open to tutorial blogs on the living room floor.

And at the eye of the storm were sprawled his sister and her friend from school: the one small, with dark pigtails and an ever-present Black Widow jacket; the other a little chubby with tight, frizzy curls that tripled the size of the beanie on her head.

“Um,” Adrian dropped his sports bag in the foyer, “What is this?”

“I told you,” Lucia said, flipping her pigtails over one shoulder as she turned her head, “It’s my Halloween costume.”

“Your Halloween...” Adrian trailed off, “Okay, when you said you were gonna make your costume this year, I thought you meant wear something purple and carry your bow around, not a Comic-Con cosplay.”

“Okay, but consider this:” Julie, Lucia’s friend from school, said, “We do what we want.”

“Did you just combine two memes out loud?” Lucia asked.

“I do what I want.”

Adrian really should have seen it coming. Lucia was like the physical manifestation of ‘go big or go home.’ She never did anything in halves, and somehow it still took everyone by surprise. All the way back in pre-school, when she wore her hair in pigtails for the first time a girl told her she didn’t like them, so she kept the pigtails ever since. And of course there was her whole superhero obsession that started a few years ago when one chance rescue by Hawkeye and Black Widow (which nearly jeopardized her and Adrian’s chances of ever leaving the apartment again, until Lucia threw a surprisingly rational fit and reminded their parents why they usually gave the two of them so much freedom) led to a junior state finalist trophy in archery, a black belt in some form of mixed martial arts that Adrian still couldn’t pronounce, and a love of superheroes that he was becoming increasingly convinced she would never get over.

“Where are Mom and Dad?” Adrian asked. He figured someone should probably supervise this to make sure it didn’t get too out of control.

“Mom’s at work. Dad’s in the shower,” Lucia said.

“My parents think I’m studying,” Julie added.

“Okaaaaaay,” Adrian drew the word out, before cautiously making his way to the big, puffy recliner.

“No! Don’t touch that!” Lucia shouted. He had reached down to remove a red wig and a pair of impossibly skinny pleather pants from the chair, but Lucia leapt up and snatched them away before he could. “Now you can sit there.”

“You smell like baseball,” Julie explained, “She doesn’t want it on the stuff.”

“I just got back from—”

“Shush, we’re concentrating,” Lucia interrupted.

For the next few minutes, the girls huddled together around Julie’s laptop, whispering to each other, while Adrian sat uncomfortably in the chair and considered getting his phone from the foyer. He could only catch every couple words they said: things like, “zipper,” and “too baggy,” and “there’s gotta be some way to do it.”

Finally, the relative quiet stretched too long for Adrian. “So, um, what are you doing right now?” he asked. He didn’t actually care; he’d grown out of all of this stuff—the over-the-top displays of geekery that Lucia was so fond of—long ago, but just sitting there doing nothing was starting to get awkward.

“We’re trying to figure out how to make a top to go with the pants,” Lucia said, holding up the twig-thin scraps of pleather she’d rescued from Adrian.

“We were out looking for stuff _all day_ ,” said Julie, “But all the leather jackets we found were either too big or too heavy metal.”

“So instead we got that,” Lucia pointed to a big roll of black material nearly identical the pants that spilled over the back of the couch.

“And now we have to figure out how to sew a skin-tight jacket,” Julie finished.

“You ever done that before?”

“I’ve sewn an unintentionally skin-tight shirt once, but that was supposed to be for a doll, and it was ugly as all hell,” Julie said, “Right now I’m looking up patterns online.” Adrian recalled a fuzzy memory of Julie taking reluctant sewing lessons from her grandma back in elementary school, which was probably when the unintentionally skin-tight shirt happened.

“Well, good luck,” Adrian said.

“Shush, we’re concentrating!”

* * *

 

**12 Days to Halloween**

 

Over the next few days, Lucia and Julie spent nearly all their free time holed up in Lucia’s living room, hunched over laptops or sheets of printer paper, coming up with designs for Lucia’s costume. As soon as school ended on Monday, they rushed through whatever homework they had and got started immediately on the costume, shunting Adrian to the kitchen to do his own schoolwork.

At one point, Adrian asked how they were going to pay for everything. From his own experience with friends making cosplays (back before he realized that more than a casual investment in that sort of thing would wreck his social standing), they cost a lot more than he suspected Lucia realized.

“I’ve got the rest of my allowance, and most of my birthday money left,” Lucia replied.

“And I’ve got a crap-ton of money from babysitting that I’m not doing anything with,” Julie added, “Plus we’re illegally selling cookies at school tomorrow until the teachers catch us.”

“That reminds me, could you check if the oven’s preheated yet?”

Even though it wasn’t Julie’s costume they were making (since her parents thought thirteen was too old to be going trick-or-treating, and wouldn’t let her stay out unsupervised after dark anyway), she became just as involved as Lucia in its creation. It was quickly decided that anything involving needles would be left to her, since she actually had experience in that department, and Lucia was liable to sew her hand to the fabric if allowed anywhere near the sewing machine. In the planning process too, Julie turned out to be very good. Lucia came up with most of the concept design, while Julie figured out how to get it done. By Tuesday, they were all ready to start making the costume.

* * *

 

**10 Days to Halloween**

 

“Are your parents home?” Julie asked.

“Not right now.”

“Good. Because if I have to take out one more row of stitches that this stupid machine screws up, I will scream obscene things at the top of my lungs.”

“Okay.”

* * *

 

**9 Days to Halloween**

 

“Hey, where’s Lu?” Adrian asked Julie as he passed through the living room on his way to the fridge.

“Bathroom. Are your parents home?” Julie asked. She laid in the same spot she’d been in since she and Lucia came home from school: sprawled in the very center of the path, tugging a needle and thread through the tough, black fabric.

“Yeah…?” he said.

Julie let out an animalistic, yet muted, scream.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes,” Julie nodded. Her eyes looked a little too wide for sanity, and even her hair appeared more frazzled than usual. “I’m just trying to sew a really thick zipper to really thick fabric by hand without bleeding on it too much.” She held up the partially finished jacket and pointed to a purple zipper strip attached to it with pins.

“Do you want to stop?” Adrian asked.

She gave him a look like he was the one who’d gone crazy, and for a moment he had no clue how to respond.

“Why is it purple if you’re doing Black Widow?”

“We’re not doing Black Widow.”

“Oh… Okay…”

* * *

 

**8 Days to Halloween**

 

“Fuck this! Fuck! This! Fuck!”

Lucia hastily grabbed the first aid kit and handed it to Julie, while Adrian looked up in alarm from the kitchen table.

“Is everyone okay?”

“Fuck!”

“She’s fine,” Lucia said, “She’s just going insane.”

“That doesn’t sound—”

“This fucking zipper broke my needle! I fucking hate zippers! They’re the spawn of Satan, and they should all burn in the fiery depths of Mount Fucking Doom!”

“She’s fine,” Lucia ran to get a new needle. 

* * *

 

**7 Days to Halloween**

 

Lucia stared at herself in the mirror, wearing the nearly finished jacket over a purple tank top. She had to be careful not to move, for fear of stabbing herself with the pins.

“Okay, now zip it up,” Julie said from behind her shoulder, with one arm crossed and the other resting under her chin in the thinking pose.

Lucia zipped up the jacket.

“Nope. Nope, nope, nope,” Julie shook her head emphatically and began sticking and unsticking pins, “Too loose here. Too tight there. That boob just looks weird.”

“Ow! Watch where you’re—do not stick a pin in my boob!” Lucia smacked her hand away.

Just then, Lucia’s mom stuck her head through the open door. “Do I even want to know what you girls are doing in here?”

Julie turned beet red and jerked her head away from Lucia’s chest, while Lucia calmly plucked the pin from her hand and slid it in the jacket herself.

* * *

 

**6 Days to Halloween**

 

“Fuck!”

“Juliet Rodriguez, what did you just say?”

“I am so sorry, Mr. Castillo.”

* * *

 

**5 Days to Halloween**

 

Julie had to go home for dinner most days, since her parents were big on “family time.” Most of the time that meant sitting in awkward silence and berating Julie for being on her phone, or everyone shouting at everyone else for half an hour. Lucia tried to stay away from Julie’s house at dinnertime.

This time, Julie had a plan.

During a lull in conversation halfway through the chicken casserole, she set down her fork and said, “Oh yeah, Lucia’s planning on going to Davie’s Halloween party this year, and I was wondering if I could go with her, since I’m not going trick-or-treating.”

There was a strategy to this, born out of many years of experience: she mentioned Lucia first because her parents liked her, and ended by reminding them of something else they wouldn’t let her do (without laying even a hint of blame on them) to subtly guilt-trip them. Even the timing was deliberate, since five days gave her parents enough of a heads up to allow something like this, but not enough time to think up some other, more creative reasons why she couldn’t go.

Her parents exchanged a glance, then turned back to Julie. And then the interrogation began: would there be adult supervision, what time was it, where would it be, what would they do there, what was the age range, who else would be there (aka was it anyone they knew), etc.

Julie answered truthfully, though with slight exaggeration. There would be plenty of adults supervising since it was an apartment-wide party (but the only adult Julie only knew was Davie’s older brother, who may possibly belong to the Russian mafia). Besides, Adrian would drive them (and then ditch the party for a haunted house with his high school friends). They would do normal Halloween stuff, like costume contests and scary stories (and splitting off a few hours in to go trick-or-treating.)

Once she mentioned the costume contest, it set off another round of questioning, asking what kind of costumes people would be wearing. (In other words, would everyone be in slutty outfits.)

“It’s just a normal costume party,” Julie assured them, “You know, zombies. Ghosts. Disney princesses.”

Disney princesses were wholesome and family friendly. Her parents wouldn’t suspect Disney princesses. Most people wouldn’t suspect how thoroughly a person like Makenna Kendrick could corrupt innocent childhood memories.

“I can get my Poison Ivy costume out of the closet and wear that,” Julie suggested. That had been last year’s costume, when Lucia went as Harley Quinn, and they conveniently forgot to tell Julie’s parents about the characters’ relationship status, since Mr. and Mrs. Rodriguez were already paranoid about the possibility of Julie being lesbian (the cause—or maybe effect—of many heated arguments about gay rights).

Her parents exchanged one more look that seemed to contain an entire silent conversation. Finally, her dad sighed, and her mom turned to Julie and said, “We’ll think about it.”

Operation: success.

 

At Lucia’s house later, Adrian plopped on the couch with the TV remote, and Lucia glanced up from her homework.

“Hey, can you drive us to Davie’s party on Halloween?” she asked.

“Yeah, sure,” Adrian said automatically, “Since when are you going to a Halloween party?”

“Officially? Two hours ago.”

“Have you told Mom and Dad yet?”

“No,” Lucia raised her voice to a shout, “Mom, Dad, can I go to Davie’s Halloween party?”

From somewhere in the house, her dad shouted back, “Sure thing!”

And that was that. 

* * *

** 4 Days to Halloween **

 

Adrian entered the apartment that day to find Lucia flapping her arms around the kitchen and shouting like a madman, while Julie ran behind her trying to get her to keep still. It took a second for Adrian to notice the long, thin strips of purple fabric clinging to his sister’s arm and the hot glue gun sitting innocently on the table next to the costume jacket.

He snatched up the glue gun before it could cause any more damage and made a hasty retreat to his bedroom.

* * *

 

**3 Days to Halloween**

 

This time when Adrian came home, it was to see Lucia lying face down on the floor and moaning piteously. Julie stood on top of the couch glaring down at the costume in what Lucia called her Extreme Thinking Pose, which was basically her normal thinking pose with an added scowl. They had lain out the entire costume from head to toe in the middle of the floor, and Adrian had to admit, it looked impressive for a couple of first time cosplay makers. At the top was the red wig still in its clear plastic packaging, and below it the jacket. Thin purple stripes, like the blue ones on the actual Black Widow, had been added to it since the last time Adrian saw it, which would explain all the kerfuffle from the day before. Between the jacket and the pants was a thick purple belt with the Black Widow symbol attached to its center, and red hourglass had been spray painted purple. At the costume’s feet sat a pair of slick combat boots that Lucia had worn everywhere since she bought them two almost two week ago. Her fake Hawkeye bow and quiver lay by the jacket’s shoulder, and two jangly bracelets that looked like purple versions of the weaponized Black Widow ones were tucked by the wrists.

“So, who is it supposed to be?” Adrian asked, ignoring Lucia’s dramatics. Now that the entire costume was laid out together, he had a pretty good guess, but out of habit he pretended to be less knowledgeable about superheroes than he actually was.

Lucia lifted her head just high enough to shoot him a dirty look, and Julie snapped, “Blackhawk,” before going back to her thinking pose.

“Isn’t that a really old DC character?” he said. So much for pretending.

“It’s Black Widow and Hawkeye, dummy,” Lucia mumbled into the carpet.

“Okay, that’s what I figured,” Adrian said, “So, um… What’s the problem?”

“Missing something,” Julie said.

Adrian just nodded like that made an ounce of sense to him.

* * *

 

**2 Days to Halloween**

 

It was missing thigh and ankle holsters.

Three hours and a frantic search through Halloween stores later, they came up with a realistic water gun and a plastic knife, but no holsters to put them in. Adrian had to drive them all over the city looking for any place that had even the slightest possibility of keeping them in stock, but no matter how hard they looked, they couldn’t find anything. And none of them were brave enough (or had enough money) to go into an actual gun shop to find one, which Adrian justified by saying minors probably couldn’t get inside anyway.

So Julie decided to make them herself. Adrian decided she was insane.

“I can do this,” Julie insisted.

* * *

 

**1 Day to Halloween**

 

“I can’t do this!” Julie shouted, throwing the mess of fabric and thread across the living room.

Adrian stared at her in concern. “Do you want to take a br—?”

“No!” both girls yelled in unison. Julie ran over to get the fabric back and start again.

She was using the left over fabric from the belt, since it was thick and stiff enough for what she needed. A quick google search for web tutorials did nothing to help, and they didn’t have enough time for the same extensive planning they did for the jacket. So she decided to just wing it instead.

Now she deeply regretted that decision.

Her current design for the thigh holster involved looping one vertical ribbon of fabric around the belt, sewing two horizontal loops to the bottom to secure it around Lucia’s leg, and… somehow attaching the plastic gun. She had a vague idea of using a loose tube of fabric to hold the gun in, but she’d worry about that later. Right now, she was still on step one.

“Can I do anything to help?” Lucia asked tentatively. She had already finished cutting the fabric into big, long strips, and Julie looked like she wanted to murder the fabric she already had.

“Yeah, try this on again. I think I got the loop too short,” Julie said.

Which was how Lucia’s mom walked into the living room to find Julie trying to measure the width of her daughter’s upper thigh while Lucia bounced around on one leg.

As soon as she left, Julie whispered, “How does she keep showing up at all the weird moments?”

“I don’t know,” Lucia whispered back, “I think it’s her mutant power.”

They were both all too aware of their race against time, but every time Lucia tried on the belt/holster something else was wrong. First, it was too loose around the thigh, then it was too tight, then it kept riding up her crotch when she walked. Then the entire thing fell off the belt.

“You know…” Adrian started to say as he watched Julie try Lucia’s method of lying on the floor and groaning.

“Keep talking and I shoot you in the head,” Lucia promised, snatching up her Hawkeye bow and nocking an arrow in one quick motion.

“You could just keep the costume as it is and not add holsters.”

She shot him in the head.

 

Later, after dinner, Julie came back with an overnight bag and a determination to keep working on the costume until they finished it, even if it took all night.

“Why are you in such a hurry to get it all done tonight?” Adrian yawned. Eventually he had forgiven Lucia for shooting him.

Both girls looked at him like he’d sprouted an extra head.

“Because _Halloween_ is _tomorrow_ ,” Lucia said.

“And tomorrow is a Saturday,” Adrian said, “You don’t have school tomorrow. You can finish it in the morning, can’t you?”

“Yeah, but…” Lucia said, “Oh.”

* * *

 

**Halloween**

 

They woke up bright and early to get to work, and breakfast consisted of microwaved biscuits and coffee at six in the morning. From the minute their alarm went off, a feeling of focused intensity saturated the air, even more so than before when they worked on the costume. Adrian claimed that was what woke him up instead of the whine of the sewing machine.

They had nine hours until the party.

Immediately, they started working on the holster. Julie had finished the general framework of it before they crashed yesterday, but she hadn’t done anything about the actual holster part of the holster, where the gun would go. After all the trouble last night, she figured this would be the easy part.

It wasn’t.

No matter what they did, the gun wouldn’t stay put. Something about the weight distribution in the grip made it nearly impossible to keep from slipping out of the holster, no matter how tight Julie made it.

“We could… attach an elastic string to the inside of the holster and loop it around the barrel?” Julie suggested.

“We don’t have elastic,” Lucia said.

“We could create a seal out of a circle of fabric by cutting flaps into it and sticking it in opening of the holster.”

“I don’t even know what that means, but it sounds like a lot of work.”

“It probably would be.”

By now, they were beginning panic. Lucia started running around the apartment screaming in a search for more purple thread and scared her dad half to death in the process. Julie almost swore again in front of Lucia’s mom, who walked into the room just in time to hear her call the sewing machine the “bastard child of Umbridge and Lord Voldemort,” which didn’t even fall on the radar of strange things she’d seen Julie do out of context.

In the end, they just stuck a bunch of double-sided tape inside the holster and hoped the water gun wouldn’t get too sticky.

They had five hours until the party.

Meanwhile, they got started on the ankle holster. This was just two loops wrapped tightly around Lucia’s left boot, two vertical strips on either side to keep it from bunching up, and the knife. Judging by how long it took to get the thigh holster to work, Julie estimated they would finish it in approximately two days.

“What are you doing?” Adrian asked, eyeing the two girls with some concern as they sat hunched around Julie’s rough sketch of her plans. Lucia sported an even more stubborn version of the Thinking Pose, and Julie was…

“Screaming on the inside,” Julie said.

“Oh… okay.”

Adrian left.

“Lucia," Julie whispered, "I don’t think I can make this in time."

“Yes you can! You’re like the little train that could,” Lucia said with a fierce glint in her eye.

“We have _five hours_ before we have to leave!”

“Remember when you said you couldn’t write that English essay the day it was due, and you did?”

“I BS-ed the entire thing and had to skip gym.”

“Yeah, but you _did it._ Plus, didn’t we just kinda BS this thing?” Lucia waved the roll of double-sided tape in the air.

Julie squinted skeptically at her.

“Do I have to do the clapping thing from Peter Pan to get you to believe in yourself?” Lucia asked.

“That scene was the most traumatic moment of my early childhood; don’t you dare use it against me!” Julie snapped, which was how Lucia knew they’d be fine. She lunged for a boot and the measuring tape with a big grin on her face.

Surprisingly, Lucia’s hunch turned out to be true once they actually began working. This ankle holster didn’t need to fit as perfectly as the last one, since Lucia’s boot would keep it from falling off, and it couldn’t get in the way when she tried to walk--two of the most difficult things about the thigh holster. The biggest problem Julie faced this time was figuring out how to incorporate the knife pouch into the outer vertical strip of fabric, and before long some of the tension in her and Lucia’s (and vicariously, everyone else in the house’s) muscles began to dissipate.

They finished with two hours to spare.

Those two hours, paradoxically seemed to pass with more frantic motion than the previous two, which were filled with a lot of long silences while Julie refrained from stabbing someone with the plastic knife. Now they had to put on their costumes and add the final touches, like makeup, which turned out to be more of a struggle than anyone expected. Julie had to re-learn how to use her green body paint without also getting it on the mirror, Lucia, her costume, and Adrian’s sports bag, and in the process of cleaning it up she somehow tangled herself in one of the leftover fake vines that she braided into her hair.

There was a brief moment of panic when Lucia thought she’d ripped her pants, before she realized it was just a thread that got stuck to her when she sat down. Her mom walked in with the camera just as Julie tried to brush it off.

Lucia’s father realized for the first time just how skintight her costume was, and, even with the purple tank top underneath, how low-cut the jacket was. Before he could say anything about it, her mom gave him a light slap on the shoulder and a warning look.

Adrian pretended to be bored.

Julie found out that she could turn her extra vines into decent whips by tying small weights to their ends, which she accidentally discovered when one caught on a pair of scissors as she hurried by and nearly chopped Lucia’s nose off.

About an hour before the party started, they remembered the wig, still wrapped up in its crisp plastic packaging, and not, as they had planned to do yesterday, cut, curled, and styled to match Black Widow’s hair. After five minutes of full-fledged panic—during which Lucia ran around gathering up every hair product the apartment and sweet talking the neighbors into letting her borrow theirs, and Julie invented more and more creative alternatives to swearing—they just decided to straighten it quickly to make it look like Black Widow’s hairstyle at the court hearing.

Finally, it was time to leave. Julie and Lucia piled into the back of Adrian’s beat up old car, making one last check to make sure they weren’t forgetting anything.

“You’ve got your phones?” Lucia’s mom asked.

“Yep.”

“Vine whips and modified arrow in case of creepy people?” For fun, Lucia had taken the foam tip off of one arrow and calculated its force of impact as more than enough to give someone a nasty bruise.  Despite what Adrian thought, she did not figure that out by shooting anyone with it.

“Got ‘em.”

“Then get going!”

Her mom shut the car door and waved as Adrian pulled out of the parking lot. Lucia started bouncing in her seat, jostling the candy corn pillowcase she brought for trick-or-treating. Hers still had rhinestones all over it from her bedazzling phase in sixth grade, and Julie’s green one had more vines attached to it.

Not even Adrian’s merciless teasing the whole ride through could dampen her mood, and by the time he stopped at the end of Davie Hargrove’s street she was still grinning, and she didn't stop as she skipped to the door to Davie’s apartment, with Julie following at a more leisurely pace.

The entire building had gone all out this year. Huge swaths of fake spider webs clung to the brick walls, and all the windows were decorated with various Halloween-themed stickers. Smoke from dry ice poured over the edges of the fire escapes and provided an eerie curtain for the front door. As Lucia and Julie got closer, they could hear music pounding from roof, and the smell of hot dogs and barbeque drifted through the air. All around them were people dressed as zombies, ghosts, vampires, Jedi knights, witches, and Harry Potter characters, and Doctor Who iterations (and one impressively skimpy Snow White), all heading to the party or milling around outside.

Greeting everyone at the door were two of Davie’s neighbors: a blond middle-aged man caked in zombie makeup and a scarecrow costume, and a young woman wearing a tight purple costume that Lucia didn’t recognize. As soon as the scarecrow laid eyes on Lucia, his eyes lit up and he pointed at her costume, shouting, “Bro, you’re Hawk-Widow!”

Lucia grinned. “Yes! But I’m calling it Blackhawk. They’re the best Avengers.”

“Hell yeah, they’re the best!” Scarecrow Guy gave her a high five, “You can’t beat Hawkeye.”

“I don’t know,” said Purple Lady with a blasé, lightly teasing air, “I think I could beat Hawkeye.”

“You wanna futzing go, bro?”

“I’ll take you on any day.”

“I’d like to see you try!”

Julie and Lucia wedged their way between the two of them and entered the apartment, craning their necks to find someone they knew. Inside, there were even more people and music, and the entire lobby area was filled up with giant refreshment tables. A sign hung above the punch bowls that read: “Spike these and we’ll sic the dog on you,” painted in dripping red letters. The dog in question sat cheerfully next to the table with its tongue lolling out of his mouth and a bunny hat on its head.

Lucia couldn’t shake the feeling that she recognized that Scarecrow Guy from someplace…

 _Oh well,_ she thought as she and Julie raced to a giant chocolate fountain on the other side of the room, _It’s probably nothing._

**Author's Note:**

> Oh look, Kate showed up in this series too. I was wondering when that would happen. (And yes I know Clint lives on a farm in the mcu, but... lets say he's got a couple apartments scattered around the cities he stays in most frequently. Yeah. That works.)
> 
> And there might be another chapter to this where they go back to the comic books store from the last fic. Depends on if I spend next week writing or with my head in another four books.
> 
> Edit: that second chapter is up now, but I decided it fit better to put it on A Trip to the Comic Book Store instead of this one.
> 
> Edit edit: you should all check out the fanart of Lucia's costume that Lymmel made me! It's amazing and perfect and amazing and I love it!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Fan Art for "Lucia Castillo, Helper of Superheroes " Series](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5454299) by [Lymmel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lymmel/pseuds/Lymmel)




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